@Shawn H Corey - I've never heard the 1st and 3rd things at 3M. AFAIK, 15% time is not required. As for the 2nd, we do have 3 software groups our manager is a software guy, but the director is a chemical engineer.

When you're hired at Google, you only have to do the job you were hired for 80% of the time. The other 20% of the time, you can work on whatever you like – provided it advances Google in some way. At least, that's the theory. Google's 20 percent time policy is well known in software engineeri...